Microsoft FrontPage 2003 by Christian Crumlish and Kate J. Chase. Published by Sybex. Before I got the book, I was doing most of the designing by trial and error. Once I got it, I had a wonderful idea of structure and how to manipulate the tools in Front Page. I am aware that there are other more sophisticated programmes out there but for someone with limited resources and a desire to learn from scratch, this book gives wonderful advice and ideas.

Found this in one of my egofeeds, btw. It’s especially nice since the two reviews at Amazon are, shall we say, less than overwhelming. I know that a book like this is going to be right for some readers and wrong for others and it’s tough to cover all the bases. In trying to do so you inevitably infuriate some of the very readers you are trying to accommodate. Still I know Kate and I labored hard on this book and Molly Holzschlag gave us a great technical edit, so I’m glad it helped at least one person.
I’m also glad that I am, for the time being, knock wood, done writing technical how-to books.

Via MediaSavvy (a site whose brand combines two of my favorite buzzwords of recent times), I found this article called The Web’s Hippie Period is So Over. It’s an amusing take on the usual web dev chitchat, despite its ahistorical spin on the recent past.

Gerry McGovern, the article’s author, is a content guy, web consultant, and author (hey, just like me!). He says that hippies (which he weirdly defines as graphic designers and programmers) may have pioneered the web when it was as creative free-for-all, but that the time for experimentation has ended and it’s time to clean the stinky hippies out of your Augean Stables of a server room and put soberminded writers and content strategists in their place. Or something like that.

Where to begin? For one thing I think we writers may have preceded the graphic designers as adopters of the web. Maybe I should be positive and mention what I agree with.

A very interesting bunch of people was attracted to the Web in the early days. They loved its lawless nature; it allowed them to experiment and express themselves.

Can’t argue with that.

These people tended to be techies and graphic designers.

Techies, sure, and graphic designers definitely saw the potential early, at least before a lot of consultants got it.

What you need today are writers and editors.

Sure, that’s true for the content-heavy aspects of the web. One thing McGovern doesn’t seem to realize is that the web is also used now to develop rich database-backed interactive applications. The web is not merely a publishing medium as we writers saw it when it first emerged. Yes, there is copy, nomenclature, information architecture, and content management issues involved in launching even a web app, but the role of techies (technical architects, DBAs, coders, production folks) and designers (including visual designers but also user-interface designers) has not withered away, even with the proliferation of cookie-cutter box-driven portals.

The Web was marketed as very complicated. It’s not. It’s about publishing. It’s about communication. The Web is made up of content, and information architecture (IA) is the discipline of organizing that content.

Simple in concept maybe, but often complex and idiosyncratic in implementation, if my experience is any guide. And much as I may wish it were true, the web is not “about publishing.” That’s a writer’s-eye view and reductive in the extreme.

The technical elements of a Web site are largely solved. The graphic design elements are relatively minor. The day-to-day job of the average site is writing and editing.

Uh, sort of. You don’t need to convince me that the ongoing life of a website involves mainly content (and sometimes user) admin, occasional database maintenance, and a revision cycle. I’ve evangelized about the need for building the content-management back end into something as robust as the cosmetic front end of any websit. Day-to-day maintenance of any site that’s more than just a billboard and a maildropin the long run takes much more manhours and management than the initial launch .

Let me tell you about writers and editors. They are generally technophobes and couldn’t care less about HTML or Java. They care about words and communication. They are a very different breed from those who built the Web.

Well, that’s a stereotype. And it’s true that writers and editors should be enabled to do their work without having to understand how the technicalities of writing and editing have been implemented under the hood. But some of us who helped build the web were (and are) writers and editors.

In fact, if I were going to characterize web pioneers and distinguish them from today’s web professionals, I’d say that in the early days we rarely specialized. We did not have the luxury and we early adopters of the web were generally interested in the whole shmear: look-and-feel, navigation, content, structure, and so on.

Overall, McGovern seems to conflate the web as an expressive medium (which it is, or can be) and the web as a business medium (which it also is, or can be).

Business, we now know, is about making money.

You don’t say!

A chaotic intranet is a productivity drain.

This is true. Near the end of the brief article, he talks briefly about intranet consolidation (IBM going from more than 7000 intranets to just one.) This is another hobbyhorse I’m happy to ride. Internal websites (sometimes called enterprise portals) should be consolidated. They are not the place for free expression and experimental creativity. But whoever said they were?

Web maestro Mark Pilgrim is always very generous about documenting his experiments and his solutions. In his Dive into Mark blog he’s working on a new design and has posted a discussion of the “pure CSS” technique he’s using to produce navigation tabs.
This is something I’ve been trying to understand for a long time myself. A lot of smart CSS and standards-compliant design gurus have discussed aspects of it online, but not yet in a way that I could fully wrap my head around.
I found one thing Mark wrote oddly reassuring, “This CSS stuff is hard; don’t let anybody tell you different.” You can either learn this stuff the hard way, by puzzling it all out yourself, or the easy way, by following Mark’s memex trails.

I’ve been playing around with Dreamweaver’s PHP/MySQL support more lately, using it to generate repeating elements from attached data sources and simple things like that. So now I think I’m ready try to understand a more elaborate project. Mitchell Harper’s Building a Persistent Shopping Cart with PHP and MySQL might be just the ticket.

Just as Blogger turned to its userbase to supply alternative templates for Blogger blogs, they are now once again running a contest, this time for their upcoming site upgrade.
In fact, from the document’s title bar (“Blogger – Template Contest”), I’d say they used the old contest page as a template.
Why do Blogger’s design work for free? Their answer:

If your design is chosen (and all you need to do is create a treatment or two, not go through a million revisions and code it—unless you want to), you’ll get our eternal graditude…oh, and some stuff that’s actually worth something: For one thing, you’ll get credit on the site for as long as we use your design. That’s to an audience of upwards of 150,000 unique visitors a day. Plus, some other prizes (we’re still assembling the package…but don’t let that hold you up).

I’m kinda interested in the site map and creative brief they offer to show participants, but it looks like the application is off-line just now.

Scot Hacker passes this along, saying: “Very cool bookmarklet for web developers—open this as a URL, then drag the bookmark icon to your toolbar”:javascript:i=0;if(document.styleSheets.length>0){cs=!document.styleSheets[0].disabled;for(i=0;i<document.styleSheets.length;i++)document.styleSheets[i].disabled=cs;};void(cs=true);.
Now you can toggle CSS on and off for any page (with any browser).